Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a search apparatus that searches for an object, a search method, and a storage medium.
Description of the Related Art
Many surveillance cameras have been installed in recent years to monitor people. A large number of systems that support operations of such surveillance cameras are proposed, and some of the systems have a function of searching a large number of images captured by the surveillance cameras for a specific person.
In the case of searching an enormous number of images of a surveillance camera system for a specific person, the following scenario can be assumed. That is, the surveillance cameras and the times are narrowed down based on information regarding where and what time a search target person was in, and the images of the person are retrieved from among the images captured in the past. Furthermore, search is performed on a large number of surveillance camera images to find where the search target person is currently present.
However, it is practically difficult to rapidly search a large number of surveillance camera images for images of a person, and the search target person moves if it takes a long period of time to perform a search. Accordingly, applications are available that search for a similar person by using, as a query, a person image retrieved from the images captured in the past.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2009-199322 discloses a method for searching surveillance video for a person by determining the sameness between a search target image and the person being captured, with the use of a face feature amount and a clothing feature.
However, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2009-199322 is problematic in that because collective similarity is determined by using the sum of simple similarities of a plurality of attributes of a person, if the distribution of the attributes of the search target is not uniform, it is not possible to perform an efficient search.
In view of the problem described above, the present invention provides a technique for performing an efficient search.